Cover image by DALL-E: “a manometer with pipe with a dolphin on a background, 3d render”

What’s the best way to store binary data in MySQL? This is a question that has multiple answers, depending on what you want to achieve. For example, if you need to optimize for the storage size, you probably need to use some compression algorithm that compresses your data efficiently. In my case, I really need the best performance, meaning the fastest response time to fetch the entire blob from MySQL.

Let’s put aside the question of whether MySQL is a good fit for storing binary data. The question here, is how to store binary data so the reads from DB are as fast as possible?

The …

On my post last week, I analysed some of the most common compression tools and formats, and its compression speed and ratio. While that could give us a good idea of the performance of those tools, the analysis would be incomplete without researching the decompression. This is particularly true for database backups as, for those cases where the compression process is performed outside of the production boxes, you may not care too much about compression times. In that case, even if it is relatively slow, it will not affect the performance of your MySQL server (or whatever you are using). The decompression time, however, can be critical, as it may influence in many cases the MTTR of your whole system.

Testing …